2019 Winners & Shortlists

Why is this work relevant for Brand Experience & Activation?

With sales down more than 40% amongst our target demographic we needed to activate the Loto with an experience that would grab the attention of young people and give them a reason to engage with what they see as an outdated product. So we launched Lucky Face–a new way to play the Loto allowing people to experience the lottery in a totally new way…with their face! The result is an activation that allowed for players to engage with the brand and play the lottery like never before.

Background

Young people are showing less interest in buying Loto tickets than previous generations, this trend is worrying Loto about future growth. To make matters worse the 20-29 demographic is the largest in the country. Red tape and bureaucracy make creating new games increasingly difficult. We were tasked with creating an advertising campaign targeting the millennial demographic with the objective of getting young people to play the lottery, while looking at Loto as something relative to their lives.BriefFind a way for Loto to connect with the next generation of players.Target audienceThe primary audience are millennials who have never played Loto, as well as those who have played before but are not actively participating. The secondary audience is anyone over the age of 18.Objectives• Increase sales• Increase brand visibility through earned media• Reach 500,000+ social media impressions.

Describe the creative idea.

With Loto sales falling amongst young people, we knew we needed to make a major change in the way millennials viewed the Loto, but we were also aware that changing the game itself was next to impossible due to regulation and red tape. Instead, we developed a new way for millennials to play the lottery that could easily be integrated into the existing Loto draw. Using the latest facial recognition technology we developed a web app that could turn anyone’s face in a unique, 6 digit lottery number. Lucky Face allows a selfie obsessed generation to use their own likeness for a chance to win a fortune. By shifting the focus from choosing lucky numbers to playing with your face we were able to reinvent the lottery in a way that appealed to an entire new generation of players, without having to make any changes to the existing Loto draw.

Describe the strategy.

Lotto had been seeing a decrease in sales over the past year.Once part of the daily ritual, where people would buy tickets at the local retailer; our now younger, digital-native population stopped finding the time and lost interest in buying daily Lotto tickets. To these young, skeptical, adults; the Lotto was perceived as old, outdated and not for them. Fearful of becoming obsolete in a country where over 40% of the population is below 25, we needed to find a way engage digital-savvy Millennials. And we needed to do so by making the whole participation experience relevant and contemporary. We simply had to go beyond simply digitalizing the traditional Lotto experience. Our Approach:Leveraging the rise of self-actualization and individualism among the Lebanese youth we sought to make buying a Lotto ticket a seamless, fun and expressive experience, one that could be unique to every person.

Describe the execution

It was important that people could participate in the Loto by taking an ordinary selfie without downloading an app or using a special device. Lucky Face only requires users to post to Instagram or visit our website and take/upload a selfie to play the Loto. We utilized Microsoft’s latest facial recognition API to build a web app that analyzes the photo, detects the users face and uses their unique facial features to generate a six-digit number that was compatible with the existing lottery draw. We targeted our audience on the platforms where the selfie is king, Instagram and Facebook. Players could play directly on Instagram by posting using our hashtag and then receiving a customized link to purchase or driven to the microsite from other platforms. The entire activation took place over the course of two draw cycles with the idea for further implementation moving forward after the campaigns success.

List the results.

The results were unanimous. In a single week we sold a record 53.138 tickets, reversing a 3 months consecutive decline. Website traffic increased by over %15,00 and we received over 2 million impressions on social media and local news websites. We received news coverage from the each of the three largest television networks worth an estimated $200,000.The campaign received a record 94% positive sentiment across all mentions and the band enjoyed a 90% increase in brand buzz. The brand plans to permanently implement Lucky Face into all future draws and is in negotiations to franchise the propriety algorithm to other lotteries across the world creating an additional stream of revenue.